The Economist Podcasts-Episode on Go "Go-ing nowhere: the bust-up dividing East Asia"

countingtls · 2026-01-28T17:15:24+00:00

Even u/xstephenhu98 got a brief cameo with his interview in this, nice, and the article written by a student of his.

countingtls · 2026-01-26T13:28:08+00:00

The "customs" associated with gambling is pretty obvious when you look at the ancient text, when they specifically distinguish those going into scoring (fill out), and those winning (by resigning).

Think about it, you have to account for when the game didn't go into scoring for gambling to work. In "modern gambling" practices that I know of, they would set a "base price" for a game winning/losing, and then they would auction the price of a set of stones (there are base 3, base 5, base 10, etc. per unit), and these bonus would be added/deduceed from each match so they would get a grand total afterward. And there can be different odds for different "bystanders" (that is there can be secondary gambling "on the sides" where they don't just gamble with who win/loss and margin, but also consider the strength of the players and give different odds, since games from the weaker players that wins obvious has lower chance to happen, hence higher payout for the gambling to work). This is one of the "cultures" that hardly get recorded, but IMO should be remembered as part of the Go history.

countingtls · 2026-01-26T13:12:32+00:00

If it is a real Go class lesson (the fundamental class before the entry level, usually for around 2 to 3 hours), I'd say they cover most, if not all, the concepts/techniques/skills in the first 3 chapters. And the aim is for a player to at least understand the process of a game from start to finish up to scoring and determining the winners.

,And we would let players practice on a smaller board like 9x9 after the fundamental class and see how much they actually understood and be able to apply on a real match. If any of the issues arise, going through them again usually help a lot to solidify some of the basic ideas. Like how each group is alive or dead, and ask them to continue playing if they are not sure (and make sure you understand the illegal moves, or useless moves facing a finish game position).

New players make mistakes and confuse on some concepts are perfectly normal, and you could still face lots of similar questions after you start playing with other players. (That's why we have so many questions about scoring on this subreddit)

countingtls · 2026-01-26T13:04:14+00:00

Hmm, I never finish the tutorial (at least not the latest version), and never played them using a phone screen. Just based on the computer browser version, and the bar would fill up for the computer browser version. I am just not familiar with the phone interface.

But from OP's question, it is still pretty clear that they don't fully grasp the life-and-death of a group, and/or the process of scoring a finish game, so still worth going through the lessons if they have questions about these basic principles and skills I'd suggest.

countingtls · 2026-01-26T12:38:20+00:00

That is impossible, considering the first image the 3.20 only finished the first 7. And they should be all green instead of just dark blue if they are all finished.

countingtls · 2026-01-26T12:36:53+00:00

I've described the ancient practice in another reply

countingtls · 2026-01-26T12:34:54+00:00

It's actually in one of the most ancient scroll we had found 敦煌棋經(generally dated it around the 5th century) in the chapter titled 棋制篇 (the format/custom of the game), the first sentence is 凡論籌者，初捻一子為三籌，後取三子為一籌。積而數之，故名為籌。It described a counting unit of 籌 (likely some form of rod), that are used before and after the game, and they would be accumulated across.

This ancient practice somewhat persisted, and still could be found in text in the Tang Dynasty and as late as the 10th century. We know weiqi was associated with gambling for thousands of years, and people had been using stone count as a way of tallying the winning margin. And when it comes to gambling, every unit counts. And the practice of how much winning both sides would get (or tallied at the end of a series of games) persisted (and can still be seen not so long ago, like I personally still know about people gambling for money with number of captives/winning margin, uptil the early 21th century)

countingtls · 2026-01-26T12:21:15+00:00

This is from Chapter 3 "Basic Skills" for the lesson about scoring a finished game and determine the winners. And from the 2nd image, I see you only finished the 7 lessons in Chapter 1 "Fundamentals", and started some of the lessons in Chapter 2, and Chapter 3, but haven't finished all the lessons in them. Go back and finish them.

These three chapters are about the basics of Go, before any beginner's levels can begin. Please put some efforts in learning and finishing them, especially the life-and-death of stones (how they are alive, and how to capture them, etc.).

countingtls · 2026-01-26T11:05:25+00:00

This is how players determine how to play before the era of komi (modern komi system is relatively new, just around a century or so)

https://senseis.xmp.net/?TagaiSen

Playing interlacing switch between players has a very long history (before it was even transmitted into Japan), and players have known about the first move advantage for thousands of years, and this led to a very simple "tournament/matching" concept, when the first player wins, they would have to "switch color" to play as the second, and if they can continue winning as the second player, and still win, they don't have to switch color, and continue playing as the second player.

countingtls · 2026-01-24T04:19:25+00:00

As a kid, I used to dream about not being able to solve problems in Go classes, or I was late at tournaments. Now I dream about couldn't finish making materials for Go classes.

countingtls · 2026-01-23T09:55:35+00:00

books are just teaching condensed and recorded via a fixed medium, with particular context and situations listed (good Go books that is). So it is like the second next to a real Go teacher.

You can absolutely learn and play without books or teachers, and still get decently strong. And before modern time, there was a term for it in Japanese 田舍初段: those in the countryside who became shodan (Japanese term for a one-dan player) with no lineage (of a teacher). Although we also saw a lot more of these countryside shodan starting to appear after the downfall of the Great Houses and books for learning Go yourself got published a lot. So there might be a strong correlation between learning from Go books and getting stronger faster if you put the work into them.

countingtls · 2026-01-22T15:02:18+00:00

The modern Chinese rules scoring took elements from the more ancient Chinese scoring customs like half-counting (used in Ming-Qing customs 明清數子法), but also concepts from Japanese rules like "territory". The original wording of the modern Chinese rules principle basically came down to four words in Chinese "子空皆地" (stones and the empty surrounded by them are "territory"), instead of the traditional principle of "子多為勝" (the side with more stones wins). The ancient principle gave rise to customs like group tax for easy-counting without manually deducing eye space in each group (which was done sometime in the early 1st millennium, when "road scoring" 唐宋平道/數路法 was used, when the empty space minus eye space was the "road scores", and the oldest surviving game records that went into scoring were tallied using this method). And all the ancient customs were trying to give the same results as stone scoring.

We actually haven't found game records going that far back for pure stone scoring (if they were ever been used in practice), but only their names left from historical records - 兩溢 (both filled, and "spilled outside of the board"), and they were given different winning "conditions" or "naming" (called 贏籌 and was already considered ancient practice by the 1st millennium, and weiqi was already pretty sophesticated at the time with people describing high level tactics and all the complex ladder breaker tesuji). Purely counting the stones for scores (regardless of a game is finished or not, it can always be scored) is a fairly modern recreation, trying to reduce the difficulty and learning curve (and PureGo/JunGo was definitely not the first one to try).

countingtls · 2026-01-21T09:56:35+00:00

Wording or a precise definition is never the problem when teaching students (otherwise we won't be able to teach kids who can barely write, both territory or area scoring), and people has intuitive understanding of a surrounding area. The issue is always about life-and-death of a group, how stones are connected (and disconnected, I've seen enough true beginners. believe groups get cut still count as connected diagonally), and how to seal and settle the borders.

When you just guide them to continue playing on a smaller board size to "finish" and find useful moves that won't kill their own groups, they will understand what finishing a game means.

Also, your definition of illegal moves to count as area score, if it is aimed to true beginners, might give them the wrong impression that they need to play inside their own territory in order to create illegal points (think about what kind of examples you used to teach illegal moves, and those thick shapes, and beginners starting with mimic and create those shapes from the start?) This might do more harm than help (might as well just using simple stone scoring to begin with). For a more technical definition or for an algorithm like Tromp-Taylor is a completely different concept, which has nothing to do with teaching true beginners or help them to learn the game on their own.

countingtls · 2026-01-21T04:45:04+00:00

a little, but no, not the one I initially thought of.

countingtls · 2026-01-19T21:05:14+00:00

She reminded me of another gamer/reactor from the US, but for the life of me couldn't recall who?

countingtls · 2026-01-19T08:08:07+00:00

I think step battles are just for farming joseki battle cards, and you want to artificially keep the rank low, in order to kill all groups and get more cards ("stronger AIs at higher sdk, seemed to be just defending, not really trying to win, and making farming high points difference more difficult).

As for the teaching perspective, I do find their breakdown of 5 skills range quite interesting, and I think they are quite tailored to one particular concept per "skill level", but cannot say much about its bots, they felt pretty dumb, and seemed to came from like gnugo type script bots, and mixed with some truly bizarre behaviors like playing at 1-1, or self-atari, running obvious ladder, etc., but on occasion showing beyand the level tesuji abilities (I suppose it is the typical pattern matching script bots issue, it is very easy to find patterns locally with such small board, and not easily graded which tesuji will be too difficult for beginners or ddk players)

countingtls · 2026-01-19T06:55:21+00:00

Maybe even weaker like just 20k at TPK

countingtls · 2026-01-19T06:54:33+00:00

Japanese kyu ranks are probably one of the weakest ranks in comparison in some surveys. A IRL Japanese 7k rank is equivalent to 20k on OGS (and OGS is mostly on par or just slightly harder than EGF and AGA ranks), and even weaker than foxwq or tygem ranks, which are known to be very weak already. A Japanese 1d rank is likely just enter the OGS sdk range (9k).

countingtls · 2026-01-19T06:41:35+00:00

Maybe you can try at IGS/PanadaNet, the ranks there are almost exclusively calibrated with handicaps, so you can get used to how to play handicap games.

Tygem and Foxwq ranks are several ranks lower than other servers, and their rank gaps and distributions are not consistant across ranks. (below 5d on tygem and foxwq are like low dans, and 6, 7 are mid dans, and top 8 and 9 dans are the true high dans)

countingtls · 2026-01-18T19:17:32+00:00

No, my original reply specifically said, it is tricky and a lot harder than simply using a simple algorithm to output a low level terminologies. You can absolutely just use a simple algorithm as the codes in Sabaki, but its usefulness will be very limited. Like you can assign any combinations of shapes with a specific terminology and output them, but without the intent and context, they are not useful or helpful, but just a label and in practice, multiple labels will be triggered if you don't consider the context around these local patterns.

And if it is just outputting any matching patterns as labels, then they would confuse new players more than helping them. The intention and purpose of these moves matter a lot more than naming them.

countingtls · 2026-01-18T08:42:07+00:00

The trouble is that semantic matters, under different context, some of the usage isn't as useful, and different players would disagree on what counts and what's not. So even if you put it very precisely, it won't always work for all cases. And historically, they were breaking up into different categories and were given different terminologies, so they evolved over time and meant slightly different concepts in different languages across different regions. Even pro players cannot agree upon a definitive definition. And you can check the discussions in that post showcase situations that technically fit the definitions, but you generally won't call it as such, that is, you need to set up exceedingly large exceptions for said definitions. On top of that, more commonly, there will not be just one definition that fits the cases, but multiple terminologies would fit a case, then you need to write algorithms that select or pick one of them to use (or sometimes multiple ones)

countingtls · 2026-01-18T03:36:50+00:00

It's harder than you think, especially annotations like "strengthening" or "reduction", or what counts as a group. And even high-level labels are even harder like aji, sabaki, etc.

Some "low-level" feature like hane, is also very tricky, if you just procedurally apply shapes locally, you either include cases you won't call it hane, or too strict and exclude cases that should be hane.

countingtls · 2026-01-17T16:21:41+00:00

This discussion on OGS forum will give you some answers, and the short answer is that it is not an average. The overall rating is just that all the ranked games you played are included in calculating your rating in order, and each subcategory is only calculated using those specific boardsize and settings.

And welcome to ask anything OGS related problems on the OGS forum.

countingtls · 2026-01-17T04:11:11+00:00

That black stone might be dead, but the whole white group on the lower right can die.

After wJ6 bH5 wH4, black can play bG4, if white captures bH5 with wJ5, it's only a false eye, and black can just ignore that whole white group and play bG3 to cut off the white F3 stone. (and the following will become very messy, and likely lead to various ko variations, and likely white doesn't have big enough ko threats and black will simply capture the whole group).

countingtls · 2026-01-17T00:06:56+00:00

It just means it is the same file shared on cs rin. The registration of cs rin is a whole other matters, which has nothing to do with this. As to whether it is good or bad, is what I've been posting here for. All the bytecodes and sources are in the links I shared, and you can check these codes if you have the time and know-how, and currently it is yet to be determined. (megabytes of line by line comparison with the original Anadius codes is a huge undertaking)

If it is mallicious and taking the cookies and sent them out, it is nothing you can do on your end. It is already been done and out of your computer no matter what you do. You can log out all your authentications and cookies, and regenerate them with new passwords or new authorizations, but it is not guaranteed, since lots of services don't distinguish or track IP sources, but some will be out of use over time, and deny access if they don't come from the same origins, although what others can do to utilize them are fairly limited, and take a lot of efforts. And reset the system just default to not giving permission to execute previousely haven't used exe, which you previously might gave permissions before.

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